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Guest post by Hugh Mather, Chairman, the Friends of St Mary’s Perivale 

St Mary’s Perivale is a tiny redundant medieval church in West London, only 7 miles away from Marble Arch. We are now a classical music centre with a national reputation and growing international outreach. The venue has a maximum capacity of only 70, but has state-of-the-art video broadcasting facilities, a good piano, perfect acoustics and a dedicated fibre-optic link to the internet. Our video facilities comprise 8 high-definition cameras and 6 high-quality microphones, and the technical quality of the broadcasts on YouTube and Vimeo is outstanding. Over the past four years we have taken a lead in livestreaming classical concerts, and pride ourselves of now being the foremost UK video broadcasting venue for instrumental and chamber music. During the pandemic, we initially broadcast daily recordings from our archive, and then over 150 ‘live’ concerts with no audience in the church. Since being allowed to admit an audience in September 2021, we have streamed another 150, making a total of over 300 broadcasts since June 2020 – more than any other venue. These activities have now been recognised by the award of the ‘Lockdown Star’ venue by the Critics’ Circle.

We are passionate about the future of livestream classical concerts, which came to prominence in the pandemic in June 2020, when they were the only means of providing performing opportunities and income for musicians. At the time they were presumed to be a temporary pandemic phenomenon, but they have now become established as an important new way of enjoying concerts. There is a huge swathe of the population who cannot travel to attend concerts, because they are variously elderly, disabled, have family commitments, live far away from a concert venue, cannot afford the cost of the ticket and travel, or cannot face an unpleasant journey, particularly in adverse weather. The convenience of being able to enjoy the concert in the comfort of one’s home, particularly via a smart TV, for little or no expense, is obviously attractive, particularly with the current pressures on living costs. While the livestream is not a complete substitute for the ‘real thing’, it is a different and valid option for many concertgoers. It is admittedly difficult to obtain emotional involvement in a concert when sitting alone at home, but this can be partially resolved by participating in ‘live-chats’, sharing opinions with other viewers, leading to the formation of on-line communities enjoying concerts together. The frisson of a ‘live’ event is important, providing an authentic ‘feel’ compared with watching old performances on YouTube.

We have now developed a ‘hybrid’ concert model, catering for two separate audiences simultaneously. We have a small cohort of 20 to 60 local music-lovers in the church, and perhaps ten times as many viewers watching the broadcast on YouTube or Vimeo, either concurrently (about 50) or in the following few days (about 250 to 500 viewers, and sometimes more). This arrangement works well for us, and we intend to continue it indefinitely. The audience in the church provides the ambience and applause, and their donations usually cover the musicians’ fees. The latter gain vital exposure from the viewing of their performances throughout the world – so far in over 50 countries. All concerts remain freely available to view for 3 weeks after a concert, and most are retained permanently. However, we receive disappointingly few donations from our virtual audience, with perhaps 2 to 5 using our PayPal Donate facility from several hundred viewers. This lack of financial support for broadcasts has been noted elsewhere, and is probably why so few other venues now livestream their concerts. Everyone has become accustomed to free entertainment on the internet. Nevertheless, we will continue to provide this important service to our musicians. We can afford to do so, because we are unpaid volunteers and have no salaries to cover, and we have no hire charges for the church, and are thus in a much better position to provide this facility than other organizations.

We specialize in solo piano recitals, making use of the large pool of exceptional pianists currently living around London, and these provide performing experience for about 65 carefully selected musicians per year. Most of the best young pianists in the UK play regularly at Perivale. We also have ‘blockbuster’ piano festivals, devoted in the past 13 months to all the Beethoven and Mozart piano sonatas, and most recently all the important Chopin piano works, and we have forthcoming talks by Julian Jacobson, Pascal Nemirovksi, John Humphreys and Peter Frankl, following on from lectures by Christopher Elton, Peter Donohoe, Leslie Howard, Vanessa Latarche, Murray McLachlan and Norma Fisher. Our performer database has details of over 150 pianists, and it is difficult to accommodate them all, but we try to be as fair as possible.

Our residual problem is that of publicity. The broadcasts only receive a fraction of the number of viewers watching some international piano competitions. It is difficult breaking into the dominance enjoyed by larger publicly funded organizations in Central London, but we will persevere and hope to attract more viewers to our high-quality concert schedule. Perhaps the award from the Critics’ Circle might increase our profile. We are dedicated to promoting the careers of the best young musicians. Do please help to spread the word.

Concerts at St Mary’s Perivale can be viewed on our website or direction via YouTube. We have around 100 concerts planned before summer 2023 – details here

 

A retired physician, Hugh Mather is a pianist and organist who organises c160 concerts per year at St Mary’s Perivale and St Barnabas Ealing. Concerts are free to attend with all donations going to support the artists.

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Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in music and who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

I don’t think I could have pursued a career in anything other than the creative arts to be honest. I was encouraged to become a musician as it was seen as a more secure career choice than pursuing my love of dance! My A level teacher, Patrick Larley, was my greatest influence and my piano teacher, John Gough, also improved my technical playing and enabled performance opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I’ve been very lucky in my life and career, but not having a job that offers me financial security is my biggest frustration

Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?

Working with Corra Sound, Harlequin Chamber Choir and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 1 week before lockdown in 2020. I also loved the experience of winning Choir of the Year in 2000 with Choros Amici on the RAH stage. And being a part of the Rodolphus Parry Songs of Farewell recording. I suppose my two concerti as a piano soloist should also be up there too!

Which particular works/composers do you think you perform best?

Corra Sound performed part of Ruth Gipps’ ‘Goblin Market’ with the RPO and I would like to pursue a recording of the full work some time soon. Her work demands more exposure. We have also just done a Music for Mothers concert series which suited us really well where we highlighted works by Sarah Quartel, Don MacDonald and Maya Angelou.

What do you do off stage that provides inspiration on stage?

Corra Sound are mostly working mothers so we have a close empathetic bond where it comes to balancing our musical work with motherhood. Our collective passion for performance is powerfully released on stage because we have mulitple plates spinning in other areas of our lives, so this is where we can finally shine and show our creative flair.

Corra Sound

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

Usually through creative and collaborative discussions both within the ensemble and with external professional colleagues. The internet, of course, then provides much inspiration and connection when a creative thread appears.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

St Mary’s, Guildford has seen us perform there twice, including last year’s Christmas concert with Emma Johnson. The venue size and acoustic suits us well. We are accustomed to intimate venues such as the drawing room at Bracknell’s South Hill Park Arts Centre but also larger venues such as St Martin’s Church, Worcester, for last year’s Elgar Festival or Romsey Abbey, Hampshire for this year’s Ethelflaeda Festival.

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?

More dynamic approaches to how diverse and creative concerts can be. Family events, more interaction between performers and audience, breaking down barriers to inclusion and broadening the concept and expectations of what performances can be.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Feeling satisfied and fulfilled with musical outcomes in serving the ongoing needs of my choirs and our audiences. Having productive and happy musical relationships with colleagues all over the world. Having compositions published or bought also feels pretty successful!

What advice would you give to young/aspiring musicians?

I am often asked for advice on tricky situations within choirs and feel well placed and experienced enough to offer support and guidance on most of these topics now! Issues are usually around personality dynamics, committees and value for money! Sometimes it’s hard to be bold when you’re a young sole trader.

What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about which you think we should be?

How crucial and valuable the arts are (for all people to have access to and engage in) and how they need to be financially supported and secure. In South Korea it’s the Arts that bring in money and exposure, which in turn raises the profile of other large businesses and corporations such as Kia and Samsung. The UK government is massively short-sighted in how its treats, values and promotes its artists. And it’s looking more grim by the day in light of new ACE cuts.

What’s next? Where would you like to be in 10 years?

Alive, happy, travelling and free

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Autumn dog walks in the woods.

Amy Bebbington directs Corra Sound in their Christmas concert on 3 December, in a programme highlighting the power of female creatives, featuring glorious and rarely-heard music written for upper voices and harp by composers from Britain, Norway and Canada. Information and tickets

Graduating with First Class Honours and a Master’s Degree in Piano Performance (UK), Amy went on to be awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts, specialising in Choral Conducting, from Texas Tech University (USA). She is the Director of Training for the Association of British Choral Directors, an organisation that sits at the forefront of choral conductor training in the UK. She oversees and tutors on their extended courses, sits on its advisory council, was the Artistic Director of its festival in Winchester (2016) and established its notable webinar series.

Amy is a co-founder of the inaugural London International Choral Conducting Competition, and sat on the jury of its inaugural event, which took place in 2018. She is also a co-founder of Wavelength, an organisation designed to celebrate and serve women in all areas of choral leadership. Amy is proud to have recently become a founding member and the UK Ambassador of the International Choral Conducting Federation (ICCF). Amy has taught choral conducting for The University of Cambridge, Sing Ireland, The Sherborne International Summer School, The Royal College of Organists, the Military Wives’ Choral Association, the ISM and the Hallé Youth Choir. She has successfully established her own Choral Conducting Masterclass Series and has recently launched a brand new online Choral Leadership and Pedagogy course (CLP). Amy has worked closely with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain as Course Director, Musicianship Tutor and Guest Tutor. 

Amy has performed in award-winning choirs and has choral works published by Banks Music Publications and Multitude of Voyces. She has had the pleasure of adjudicating for both the Derry and Cork International Choral Festivals, Choir of the Year, Music for Youth National Festival and the Cheltenham Music Festival, among many others. As a teacher trainer/animateur, she has worked for Trinity/Open University, Glyndebourne Education, Sing for Pleasure, Youth Music and Music of Life.

Amy is in great demand as a choral clinician, mentor and teacher, and is currently Musical Director for Harlequin Chamber Choir, Corra Sound, Holmbury Choral Society, Nota Bene and the Sir William Perkins’s School Chamber Choir.

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The exceptionally gifted British composer William Baines died 100 years ago on 6 November 1922; he was just 23, yet he left behind a remarkably large body of work, which is celebrated in this new release from pianist Duncan Honeybourne, a long-time champion of Baines’ music.

Born in Horbury near Wakefield, Yorkshire, William Baines came from a musical family (his father was a cinema pianist and organist at a Primitive Methodist Chapel). He took piano lessons from a young age and also studied at the Yorkshire Training College of Music in Leeds, though his later compositional style was largely self-taught. At the age of 18, in the final months of the First World War, Baines was called up for military service and was sent to Blandford Camp, Dorset, for training. Within weeks he feel ill with septic poisoning and remained in fragile health after discharge from the military until his death in 1922. After the War, Baines set to composing, producing around 150 works by the time of his death, many of which were piano miniatures.

When a composer, such as Schubert or Mozart, or indeed William Baines, dies young it always begs the question “what might they have gone on to write”? There are certainly some intriguing hints throughout this generous disc.

Baines described himself as “like Debussy” and while some of his music is certainly impressionistic in style – in particular the Pictures of Light suite and the atmospheric diptych Tides, which evokes the coast and sea of his native Yorkshire – there are also unexpected and daring modernist idioms, unsettled harmonies and conflicting textures redolent of Scriabin, Ravel and Prokofiev (Baines’ Eight Preludes were written at the same time as Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives). Some of the pieces on this disc share that particularly English romantic/pastoral soundworld of Delius and Ireland, yet everything is distinctly Baines.

The album includes first recordings of Eight Preludes – Set 2, and Pictures of Light, together with Baines’ most well known works, Tides and Paradise Gardens. The album also includes a suite of five songs for tenor and piano, sensitively and emotionally sung by Gordon Pullin – also a first recording. At the Grave of William Baines is a substantial piece for piano written by Robin Walker, a fellow Yorkshireman who as a boy lived near to the house in York where Baines lived and died, and whose music also draws inspiration from the natural world and local landscapes. His tribute is surprisingly muscular, playful, and rather exotic, replete with hints of Baines, and imaginatively shaped by Honeybourne.

Duncan Honeybourne is very much at home in Baines’ picturesque, atmospheric music. He is ever alert to the ecstatic climaxes and sweeping, Lisztian romanticism, bringing supple, flexible tempi and subtle rubato to passages which feel almost improvisatory. And then there is a glittering clarity and multi-layered textures coupled with a gorgeously warm, yet transparent piano sound.

This album is a wonderful introduction to the imagination, originality and genius of William Baines, brilliantly illuminated by Duncan Honeybourne’s compelling performance.

Pictures of Light is available on the Divine Art label and also on Spotify

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On 12 March 2020, pianist Igor Levit tweeted the following:

He then rushed out of his flat to purchase a cheap camera stand, returned home, then realised he also needed a stand for his phone, so he slipped out again. A friend was co-opted to help ensure the livestream was working. At 7pm Berlin time, Igor Levit gave his first livestreamed “haus konzert”.

Two days before, on 10 March, his birthday, Levit gave a concert in Hamburg; the next, in Cologne, the following day was cancelled, and it was now clear that live music, and similar activities, were being shut down, who knew for how long, in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Levit gave 52 house concerts via Twitter, dressed casually and livestreamed from his flat, its minimalist decor interrupted only by the shiny grand piano and a striking painting on the wall behind. It became a nightly ritual, for pianist and audience. He performed whatever repertoire “felt right” – from Beethoven to Morton Feldman, Nina Simone to Schubert and Bach; it didn’t matter, for these performances were about being together when we were isolated in lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in via Twitter every night and the livestream feed was crammed with comments, compliments, emojis; there was a potent sense of a shared experience, even though we were all listening on our own, separated by lockdown, yet together. Spontaneous and unplanned, these house concerts helped to alleviate Levit’s – and others’ – lockdown despair and isolation, a means of keeping live music going when it was unclear when we would be allowed back into the concert halls to enjoy live music again, together. The Observer chose Levit’s online recitals as number one in its top ten classical picks for 2020.

From a pragmatic point of view, the house concerts were also an incentive for Levit to keep practising, an impulse shared by so many musicians whose performing careers stopped dead in March 2020. Like many of his musician colleagues, in the months before the covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, Levit was enjoying a busy career: without concerts, what was the point of practising?

Igor Levit performing in his Berlin flat during lockdown

Igor Levit’s new book ‘House Concert’ (published in the UK by Polity press in November) is about these Twitter concerts – the musician’s need to play, to express oneself through music, and the experience of playing in isolation to an unseen audiences of tens or even hundreds of thousands – but it’s about much more than this too.

Organised in a series of conversations and diary-type entries between Levit and German journalist Florian Zinnecker, ‘House Concert’ explores what it is to be a professional musician in the 21st century, and charts Levit’s career from an unknown young pianist to an internationally-acclaimed performer who plays to sold out houses around the world. It’s about the development of an artist; what it means to “be” a pianist and the need to perform, to share one’s music with others; the role and power of social media, in particular Twitter; the classical music industry; and wider issues of whether it is appropriate for an artist to engage in politics and other pertinent issues of our time – the pandemic, racism, climate change.

Levit’s path to international fame was not an easy one. As anyone who has attended one of his concerts will know, he is an uncompromising player who has a remarkable ability to create an intensity of sound and concentrated emotion when he performs (Alex Ross of The New Yorker describes him as “a pianist like no other”). His choice of repertoire may be considered “narrow” by some: eschewing the big showpieces or “top of the pops” of the pianist’s repertoire, he has instead chosen to focus on a handful of composers, recording and performing the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and Rzewski’s mighty ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated’, together with lesser-known works by Busoni, Reger and Ronald Stevenson. As a young pianist at the start of his career, his uncompromising attitude and refusal to “play to the gallery”, as it were, to satisfy the whims of the market by including the popular classics in his programmes, meant that he was overlooked by artist managers and agents who felt he was not sufficiently marketable. This section of the book offers some really fascinating, honest and sometimes brutal insights into the workings and attitudes of the classical music “industry” today – where marketability is placed above artistic integrity. Levit didn’t fit the image that record companies were looking for and he was not willing to compromise; as a consequence it was a long time before he was picked up by a manager who was sufficiently sympathetic to his way of doing things. (An indication of how the industry reacts to the maverick, when Levit recorded Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas for his debut disc, there were more than a few mutterings that he was too young, that it was an impertinence that he should record these works at his age. It was a risk, but it was a worthwhile one: as anyone who has heard Levit perform late Beethoven knows, he is a master in this repertoire.)

The Twitter concerts throw an interesting light on the ecosystem of the classical music business and the power structures within in. In his house concerts, Levit demonstrated that it was possible to reach an audience directly via social media, without the usual tools of the business – marketing, publicity, staging. The simplicity of the Twitter concerts made them special – and for Levit they made him feel strong, that he wasn’t a fake.

For the pianist, Levit makes some challenging assertions regarding interpretation, context and the over-intellectualisation of music and its performance. He eschews the notion that music must have “meaning” or a distinct narrative, or that there is a “right way” to play it, and feels it is “just there to be experienced”. He sees the role of the musician as an “enabler”, one who brings the music to life from the page by making the piece his own.

“I’m telling my own story…the one that’s closest to my heart. The information about what happened to this piece one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago isn’t really my business.”

Igor Levit

In the realm of classical music, with all its conventions and tradition, where fidelity to the score and an appreciation of the context in which the music is written is regarded as essential to any “authentic” performance, Levit bucks the trend. Because he’s not interested in tradition or convention; for him it’s all about the music. He’s not interested in whether in his performances of Beethoven we hear the sound of Beethoven. For him, “it’s Beethoven, of course, but played by me.”

A keen activist, the book also explores Levit’s vocal opposition to German right-wing attitudes to immigration, anti-Semitism and online hate crime, and his advocacy for environmentalism, the plight of Syrian refugees. He’s received abuse and even death threats for his views but he refuses to submit to “artistic neutrality”. Does he believe music can make a difference, shift attitudes and effect change? Absolutely not: “If you believe music will make fascists less fascist, then you’re just naive” – and for this reason his music and his activism are kept largely separate, though his large social media following and reputation undoubtedly serves his activism.

This absorbing and highly readable book is neither diary nor straightforward artist biography. It shifts back and forth between periods in Levit’s life, from student days, to now, and explores a variety of themes, not all of them musical. It not only showcases the remarkable achievements of a charismatic classical musician, it also reveals their anxieties and doubts, strengths and weaknesses, and offers an important snapshot of the difficulties faced by professional musicians in a highly competitive industry riven with convention, power structures and tradition. The success of Levit’s house concerts – and similar livestream projects from other musicians all around the world – perhaps prove that the industry does not necessarily need all the trappings of “the business” to communicate and share the power and joy of music with others.

‘House Concert’ is published by Polity books (November 2022). Further information here